“American civic education should teach students how to be citizens” and help them find their place both in the “country and in the world,” says Bill of Rights Institute president David Bobb. He argues that the recently released “Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy,” an “inquiry-based content framework” for improving K-12 history and civics, can help to achieve this goal.
The Roadmap was the product of a 20-month collaborative process between members of Educating for American Democracy, a cross-ideological coalition of over 300 scholars, educators, students, and administrators funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education. The Roadmap is organized around seven themes such as civic participation, “We the People” as a political idea, and the United States’ place in the world. It provides key historical and civic concepts for each theme, covering important topics such as the virtues necessary for republican citizenship. Additionally, it gives teachers sample questions grouped by grade level and five design challenges featuring topics that tend to be left out of classroom discussion.
EAD’s pedagogy companion helps teachers implement the Roadmap in their classrooms, while its resource library includes curricula, lesson plans, and interactive games. The Roadmap helps achieve EAD’s three objectives: giving 60 million students access to EAD-aligned civic learning opportunities, ensuring that 100,000 schools feature EAD-aligned civic learning plans and resources, and preparing 1 million K-12 teachers to use the Roadmap.
David Bobb and Paul Carrese, director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, were heavily involved in developing the Roadmap. According to Carrese, its creation was inspired by a “clear lack of adequate civics and history education” in the United States, a shift that was already taking place in the mid-1950s, when his father taught middle school history and social studies.
The Roadmap corrects this imbalance by helping teachers instill core knowledge and civic virtues, with the goal of developing “wise, prudent, thoughtful, and patriotic citizens,” Bobb says. It forges a “new community compact between teachers and parents,” Bobb continues, “based on presenting viewpoint diversity.”
Rather than attempt to secure a “mushy middle,” Bobb explains that EAD members “set aside the usual polarization” and grappled with differing views, ultimately finding compromise. “The Roadmap pulls national conversation to the center,” Carrese says, pointing out how most teachers reject ideological indoctrination in the classroom.
Both Bobb and Carrese argue that the key to creating thoughtful citizens is free and open debate. Bobb states that the Roadmap allows for “Socratic exchange, where students are invited” to become “conversant with the American political tradition,” growing in knowledge as they study and ask challenging questions. Ultimately, it “rekindles and reinvigorates civic friendship,” in Bobb’s estimation, because it promotes ideas and principles that Americans “hold in common,” which “can help us surmount many areas of disagreement.” Carrese maintains that by examining contentious questions – ranging from the Constitution’s relationship with slavery to the events of January 6, 2021 – the Roadmap immerses students in debates about America’s defining ideas.
The Roadmap, Bobb argues, does not implement a national curriculum – but it does challenge the “hegemony” of textbook cartels, giving teachers the freedom to “choose the curriculum for the best civic education.” The Roadmap was designed to give states and individual communities guidance to decide for themselves how they will implement it in their classrooms.
Neither Bobb nor Carrese – nor the Roadmap itself – endorses or encourages the idea of proselytizing teachers turning students into political activists or pushing critical race theory and “action civics.” As Bobb and Carrese note, however, teenagers do need to develop a strong voice of their own, considering that most will be voting by the time they graduate from high school. Carrese argues that focusing on important duties pertaining to citizenship doesn’t detract from highlighting vital civic knowledge.
Even with increased civic unrest in the United States, Bobb believes that educators have an important opportunity to revive civic education. Most Americans, he contends, still believe in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream – the idea that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”
For Bobb and Carrese, the Roadmap signals the potential beginning of a civic rebirth – one whose success will hinge on parents, teachers, and school boards coming together for the good of students.
An Idaho cop was suspended this week after a video of him poking fun at NBA star LeBron James went viral on TikTok.
Last week, after an officer killed a teenage girl wielding a knife to save the life of another black girl, James threatened the cop in a Twitter post that said “YOU’RE NEXT #accountablity.” It was after James quickly removed the tweet and then refused to apologize that Deputy Nate Silvester made a video mocking the Los Angeles Lakers player and pretending to ask him for advice on policing.
“Excuse me, could you please put the knife down, sir,” Silvester yelled before asking a fictional James “you don’t care if a black person kills another black person, but you do care if a white cop kills a black person, even if he’s doing it to save the life of another black person?”
“I mean, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then again you are really good at basketball so I guess I’ll take your word for it,” Silvester continued.
The TikTok, which garnered more than 700,000 likes by Thursday afternoon prompted a public condemnation from the Bellevue Marshal’s Office which said it heard about the “extreme controversy” from people in the community who “took the time to reach out to us.”
(Be sure to click on below to view the clever phone call!)
“The statements made do NOT represent the Bellevue Marshal’s Office. The Bellevue Marshal’s Office always demands that our Deputies engage with our citizens in a friendly and professional manner. This is NOT how we expect our Deputies to act on duty or use city time. This is a personnel issue that is being dealt with internally,” the department said in a statement posted to Facebook.
While Silvester is still technically employed by the Marshal’s office, his best friend started a GoFundMe, which raised more than $92,000 in the first day, to rally support for the officer while he is suspended. A portion of the donations will be given to a charity for “families of fallen officers and first responders,” the fundraising website states.Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.
It would be foolish to deny that there’s a specific significance when citizens are unjustly killed by the police, as a jury in Minneapolis determined last week happened to George Floyd. Armed agents of the state funded by taxpayer money have special obligations, and that includes avoiding the unjust killing of citizens. When the killing is captured on video, an intense emotional reaction is doubly understandable. Subscribe
But with the gigantic outpouring of global attention that the Floyd case received — and with virtually every major elite US institution united in both their condemnation of the death-inducing act, and their claimed resolve to continue doing unspecified reparative “work” — it would be foolish to not also notice the comparatively miniscule attention that other instances of unjust killings receive. If one unjust killing (Floyd) generates sustained, historic, society-altering attention, and hundreds or thousands of others generate virtually no attention, the reasons for that disproportionality have to reflect something about a society’s cultural and political priorities.
This is especially true in Minneapolis, where the tumult of the Floyd episode and its fallout has now lasted for nearly a full year. Because it simply cannot be disputed that the prevalence of unjust killing and violence in the Twin Cities area has vastly increased since last summer’s protests and riots. Minneapolis recorded its second-most homicides ever in 2020 — after only 1995, when the city was ignobly dubbed “Murderapolis” in national media. And the trend has continued to escalate in 2021: between January 1 and April 25, the number of homicides increased by 92% compared to the same period in 2020. More than 80% of the shooting victims in 2020 were black.
“We’re gonna blow Murderopolis off the charts this year,” one Minneapolis cop told me. (Names in this post have been withheld or partially redacted. As you may be aware, there is often intense suspicion of journalists amongst both civilians and police.)
The situation is roughly the same in Saint Paul, which tied its all-time record for homicides in 2020. This year, it is on pace to break that record comfortably. The latest homicide was on Sunday night; a man was shot and killed outside a bar in an apparent carjacking. I visited the bar the following day and there was hardly any sign something was amiss — the manager only insisted that the killing had nothing to do with the bar. (Carjackings in the area have surged to an astronomical degree, as I can personally attest. See below.)
“There’s way more people it seems like with guns now than there ever has been,” another Minneapolis cop told me, and “much less hesitation to use them.” These officers theorize that the explanation for the crime surge is related to the city’s political climate over the past year, which in their view has allowed perpetrators to wreak havoc without consequence. “They feel emboldened and they feel untouchable, in my opinion,” the cop said.
Yes, it’s true: police are generally not credentialed experts in criminology or sociology, and their theories for complex multi-causal phenomena obviously should not be taken as gospel. Still, it is worth incorporating their viewpoint into any assessment of the overall situation. Just as it’s worth taking into account the perspectives of non-police citizens who virtually never factor into national media narratives — narratives which are usually crafted by elites who live in affluent areas that undergo little or no violent crime. And while they express it differently, regular citizens (including non-whites) often have a similar perspective as police on the issue of crime prevention.
On Sunday afternoon, April 25, a woman and her husband were sitting in their truck outside her place of work in North Minneapolis. The woman is employed as a home elder care assistant. Without warning, a fusillade of high-powered shots rang out around them; two of her children were also in the truck. She had to shout for them to “get down, get down,” as she tearfully recounted to me moments later. “My kids was crying because they didn’t know what was going on… they scared,” she said.
“I was right by my front door,” another witness told me of when he first heard the shots. “I could feel the sonic boom. Big fucking guns, war guns,” he said. “Afghanistan guns.”
Seconds after the firing erupted — 15 or 20 shots in total — the woman and her husband saw an elderly man who had just walked past them on the sidewalk staggering back in their direction, now suddenly bleeding from the neck. They rushed up to him, guided him to sit down on some front steps, and tried to stanch the bleeding while they called for an ambulance.
In all likelihood, this was a random bystander who’d been struck. A police spokesperson later told me the injury was non-fatal — I happened to be close by at the time of the shooting, and I watched EMTs roll him into the ambulance on a gurney. It certainly looked like the injury would’ve been fatal in another few minutes had there not been a speedy medical intervention.
The woman who had helped the elderly man was crying. “Yes, I’m upset. And I’m hurt because I just witnessed a man shot in his neck,” she said. “My take about this is it’s crazy. Like people is getting killed for no reason. Innocent people.” When asked if she thought this sort of thing was happening more frequently than usual in Minneapolis, she said: “Yes, way more.”
Kevin C. is 22 years old and lives with his younger sister in their great-grandmother’s house off Lake Street in South Minneapolis — the epicenter of last summer’s riots and protests. He was a protester himself, and even had to jump out of the way during an infamous incident when a tanker truck nearly barreled into the crowd he was in on the interstate.
Now almost a year later, he told me his current preference is for police to be more aggressive in curbing indiscriminate violence in his neighborhood. A few weeks ago, he said, there was a shooting in the alley behind his house — bullets were flying just yards from him and his sister. “The police came, but they didn’t really like, investigate,” he recalled. “They just shined their lights and then drove off.”
He said he’d noticed a steep decline in police presence lately, especially after last week’s trial of Derek Chauvin ended with a guilty verdict. “Even before the trial,” he said, “they would drive through here, but there wouldn’t be any, like, policing going on.”
A memorial adjacent to the alley behind Kevin’s house where the shooting recently occurred
Kevin said he and his family uniformly wanted police to be more assertive — in the sense of addressing genuine threats to public safety such as shootings, though without any extraneous harassing behavior thrown in. “Honestly, we just want them to do what they supposed to do. All the extra stuff, you can just keep. That’s for the birds. If there’s a problem, and we’re contacting you to come check it out, we expect you to do above and beyond the call of duty. Not — you know what I’m saying — do what they usually do. Just come over here, flash a light, and speed off.”
He is shortsighted, and said the eyeglasses store he used to go to down the street has been permanently shuttered since last summer.
Minneapolis cops tend to agree that the primary reason for this surge in crime is that their resources have been stretched precariously thin, as a result of widespread anti-police sentiment since the George Floyd episode. “It’s kind of like the Wild Wild West out here,” one cop told me.
“Usually a cop should take about ten calls a day,” he said. “I’m already at like, thirty. So that’s way overboard. I mean, you’re gonna have burnout. You’re gonna have people quitting.” Fourteen officers had left in just the past week since the verdict, he said.
“One of us is gonna get killed and nobody cares. And that’s what’s sad. Nobody cares. Not the citizens, not our brass. Not our administration, not our city. They don’t care. They don’t care one bit.”
The Target store where much of the rioting first kicked off last year is now adorned with a corporate-sponsored artistic mural that appears to glamorize the burning of the Third Police Precinct building, which is located right across the street.
The cop said he expects an even more concerted round of mass resignations the next time a “big incident” happens wherein the cops are portrayed in a negative light: “We’re getting fed up. All of us. And there’s only a few of us left that really want to work for the city.”
“We’re not gonna be here. We’re gonna all leave,” he said. “So this is gonna get worse before it gets better.”
The Minneapolis Police Department didn’t specifically track carjackings as a unique category of crime until September 2020. A retroactive analysis showed a 537% increase in carjackings in one month — November 2020 — compared to November 2019. Yes, you read that correctly: 537%. (I haven’t independently corroborated this data, and it may well have been imperfectly collected, but a substantial increase seems beyond dispute.) Additional data given to me by police show that carjackings are up 180% year-to-date in 2021 between January 1 and April 25.
This truck was carjacked on the morning of Monday, April 26 and recovered later that afternoon after the perpetrators led police on a high-speed chase. It was spray-painted black to evade detection, but a neighbor spotted the spray-painting taking place and called police. The perpetrators fled and were not apprehended
I was sitting in my car in South Minneapolis on the afternoon of Sunday, April 25 when a young man appeared at my driver-side window. He banged on the window and motioned for me to roll it down. With the window still closed, I repeatedly asked him what he needed. He continued motioning for me to roll down the window, without verbalizing any request. Cognizant that carjackings were on the rise, and seeing the young man’s hand conspicuously concealed inside his front hoodie pocket, I drove off. As I looked in my rearview mirror, two other young men popped out — unbeknownst to me, they had encircled my car. I can’t say for certain that it was an attempted carjacking, but I don’t know what else it would’ve been, and everyone I have described the incident to (cop and civilian) affirmed that it had all the hallmarks of an attempted carjacking.
NOTE: I am not traumatized by this incident. I am not declaring myself a benighted victim on account of this incident, and I am not otherwise requesting any special accommodations in relation to this incident. I’m simply relaying it as a thing that coincidentally happened *while I was in the process of reporting on crime patterns in the Twin Cities area* — and which was consistent with the tactics reportedly employed to execute carjackings, which have demonstrably surged.
The potential attempted carjacking incident occurred as I was going to gather more information about a recent Minneapolis murder victim, Maria Elena Mantini. She was 78 years old, and stabbed to death at a bus stop on the morning of March 17, according to police. Two other people are thought to have been stabbed by the same suspect; they both survived.
The bus stop where Maria Mantini was reportedly killed has subsequently been removed
There’s little information about Mantini in the public record, so I went to the apartment building in South Minneapolis where she lived. Several acquaintances had noticed her absence, but were completely unaware that she’d just been violently killed. They’d received no notice.
“I was friends with her. She usually came to you when she had a problem,” said Mary, a resident of the apartment building who said she often hangs out in the lobby to help “keep the riff-raff out.”
“I didn’t know that she was killed,” Mary told me. “I thought she died of natural causes.”
According to T.Y., the lobby companion of Mary who resides in the building and also works security at the front desk, Mantini is the first person who lives in the building known to have been killed since 1996 — back during the peak of the “Murderapolis” era.
“She went to Target every day,” T.Y. recounted. He was particularly dismayed upon learning of Mantini’s death because they’d developed a longstanding friendly rapport. “She basically just came to me most of the time, and tell me always ‘thank you’ for being down here — because she was more concerned about the building. You know, she just said ‘Thank you, T. Y.’ for working down here.”
Both T.Y. and Mary said their experiences with Mantini were pleasant, but minimal. “She came in the community room a few times and had coffee with us,” Mary said. “There’s a lot of things that she couldn’t eat because of her heart. She was only allowed to have one cup of coffee.” She lived alone; they didn’t think she had any family. Mary recalled that she was very private and concerned for her safety: “She was very suspicious of people.”
“Oh my god, I know exactly who you’re talking about,” another resident interjected. “She was a sweetheart. I used to run into her in the elevator sometimes. She was real quiet. She had a soft voice when she talked.”
The group’s conversation eventually turned to wider political issues. “I don’t know what fool would think about defunding the police,” T.Y. — who was formerly in the Army — remarked. “Because once you do that, who’s gonna protect you?”
Bear in mind that it’s still relatively cold in Minneapolis — violent crime always upticks in the summer, so the signs of what’s to come are ominous. This massive escalation in violent criminality doesn’t detract from the unjustness of Floyd’s death, but you’d think there’d be at least some interest in ascertaining a more complete picture of what is going on in the area. Oftentimes these incidents barely make it into local media, let alone national media.
Here is the exact location at a Saint Paul auto body shop where 36-year-old Mohamed Jama Samatar fell to his death on March 30 after being ambushed by a shooter who’d pretended to be a customer:
Here is the makeshift memorial for Iaan James Wade, a 19-year-old who was shot to death April 22 in North Minneapolis:
There will never be cries to “say their names,” nor will enormous crowds of protesters ever demand “justice” on their behalf. Again, the unique political resonance of cop-on-civilian killing makes the outsized focus on those events understandable. But when you spend some time in the crime-surging Twin Cities looking into other victims of unjust violence, the disproportionality of the focus does make you think.
At some point in the 1980’s, when Rudy Giuliani was a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, my mother went with a friend to hear him talk at a local meeting. She came home enormously impressed. The speaker, she reported, was not all that good-looking, but he was a real “comer.”
As always, Mother was right. After an unsuccessful run for New York City’s mayor in 1989, Giuliani was finally elected to that office in 1994 — and then re-elected in 1998. At the end of his second term, he found himself fortuitously in the right place at a terribly wrong time, effectively able to aid and bolster the stunned, bewildered people of his city after the 9/11 attack.
There was no braver man in the Big Apple at that time. Just as he had “taken on” the New York City Mafia and won, so the mayor confronted the challenges of the horrific attack on the World Trade Center. Risking his life, Giuliani reported to Ground Zero and heroically led suffering New Yorkers to safety through the white rubble of wilderness.
For some, he was the 20th-century equivalent of Moses. Time magazine named him the 2001 Person of the Year. (Well, okay, they had given the same distinction to the Ayatollah Khomeini twenty-two years earlier!) But the point is that Rudy Giuliani was for a while not just the head honcho of the Big Apple. He was the Mayor of America.
It wasn’t just for his 9/11 heroics that he earned that accolade. During his two-term administration, he cleaned up New York City as it hadn’t been before and hasn’t been since. Every year that I visited my family in New York, I could see the miraculous changes. The bums were gone from the theater district’s skid row. The homeless were relocated to facilities up the Hudson. Tall, beefy cops patrolled every subway in New York’s vast underground system. Anyone comparing the city then and now would give high marks to His Honor.
But in the intervening years, it has become political sport to turn the tables of affection on Rudy Giuliani. Originally a Democrat, he had over the years become a highly regarded Republican, at one time aspiring to the presidency. But now, solely by dint of his affiliation with Donald J. Trump, he is regarded by Democrats as a “traitor” to the nation. That is a serious charge, but “words matter” to Democrats only when it suits their purposes.
To emphasize the danger the Biden administration associates with this septuagenarian, this week, his apartment in New York City was forcibly entered by FBI agents, who seized whatever electronic devices they could get their hands on. This unexpected maneuver was undertaken despite the fact that it came in the midst of cooperative ongoing conversations with Giuliani’s attorney concerning the charges against him.
Media gathered outside Giuliani’s apartment (YouTube screen grab).
Not surprisingly, these had to do with the Trump administration’s concerns about Joe Biden’s pressuring the Ukrainian government to dismiss any investigation into corruption by the firm Burisma, which handsomely compensated Biden’s son Hunter for his “service” on its Board of Directors. Never mind that Biden was, himself, guilty of quid pro quo, having said openly that he would withhold money from the Ukrainian government unless the investigation of Burisma was halted.
So, though complaints against Giuliani and company had been lodged by Democrats many months ago, it took a Biden presidency to see to it that Rudy was humiliated by an FBI “home invasion” reminiscent of the harrowing one launched against another elderly Trump associate, Roger Stone. In that early-morning raid covered by tipped off CNN, Roger and his frail wife feared for their safety.
It would seem that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is capable of thwarting — or willing to thwart — only old conservative men. They haven’t bothered to breach the walls of the sprawling Clinton compound in Chappaqua for incriminating evidence in the matter of the faux dossier by Christopher Steele, financed by the DNC with funds from Hillary’s campaign.
Nor have they bothered to bust into the fashionable Los Angeles digs of Hunter Biden, perhaps rummaging through his steel straws and various “extraneous” laptops to find evidence of his sweetheart deals with the wife of a Moscow mayor and a lending institution in China.
If Democrats cannot parse issue along racist lines, they handle it through sheer politics. The ruling objective of even the thinnest Democrat majority is to discount, dismay, and destroy the opposition. Hence, a credible servant of the people like Rudy Giuliani has his apartment invaded by a swarm of government agents.
Even before this recent ordeal for Giuliani’s family, he had routinely become the object of scorn by leftist publications, who minimized his successes as New York’s mayor and suggested he had become a bug-eyed madman. These are the same journalists — if that’s the word — who would rise in resentment at any reference to Joe Biden’s cognitive lapses — or his vacant, squinty eyes.
The sudden sea change in attitude toward Republican politicians is in lockstep with the woke’s “cancel culture” campaign. Once revered as an American icon, someone on the right of the political spectrum can be just as quickly sabotaged — as was the case with 60 Minutes‘ inaccurate reporting on Florida governor Ron DeSantis — or even relabeled as a traitor to America. This scary scenario is nevertheless strategically preferred by the left, whose intent is to reconstruct — or more accurately, destruct — America in its own image. Incidentally, apologies for lapses in truth-telling are rarely forthcoming.
To accomplish this form of tyranny, it is necessary to confuse and humble Americans. Ransacking Giuliani’s apartment and trashing the reputation of its occupant is not at all different from tearing down a statue of a Confederate leader. In the eyes of a power-hungry Democrat party, any rearrangement of historical truths is permissible as long as it advances their political goals.
There is a move afoot to defund or redefine the police in America. But rest assured: the FBI agents who break into the homes of Trump-supporters will not be dismissed as unessential or threatening. In fact, they appear to have become a willing strong arm of the party in power.
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(Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)
It has become known as “Havana syndrome” because that’s where the attacks first started back in late 2016. At the time they were often described as “sonic attacks” because those who experienced them described a particular high-pitched buzzing sound which seemed directional. After many more such attacks including in Cuba and later also in China the U.S. became convinced that Russia was likely using some kind of directed energy weapon against U.S. spies.
Today, CNN reports that federal investigators are looking at two more recent incidents including one last year that happened near the White House last November.
Defense officials briefed lawmakers on the Senate and House Armed Services Committees on the matter earlier this month, including on the incident near the White House. That incident, which occurred near the Ellipse, the large oval lawn on the south side of the White House, sickened one National Security Council official, according to multiple current and former US officials and sources familiar with the matter.
In a separate 2019 episode, a White House official reported a similar attack while walking her dog in a Virginia suburb just outside Washington, GQ reported last year.
Those sickened reported similar symptoms to CIA and State Department personnel impacted overseas…
Rumors have long swirled around Washington about similar incidents within the United States. While the recent episodes around Washington appear similar to the previous apparent attacks affecting diplomats, CIA officers and other US personnel serving in Cuba, Russia and China, investigators have not determined whether the puzzling incidents at home are connected to those that have occurred abroad or who may be behind them, sources tell CNN.
As noted above, the incident in 2019 was reported by GQ in October of last year. The article pointed out that the occurrence had become so common that CIA employees simply referred to it as “getting hit.” Shortly after Thanksgiving 2019, according to three sources familiar with the incident, a White House staffer was hit while walking her dog in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. According to a government source familiar with the incident, the staffer passed a parked van. A man got out and walked past her. Her dog started seizing up. Then she felt it too: a high-pitched ringing in her ears, an intense headache, and a tingling on the side of her face. According to the source, this had happened to the staffer before. In August 2019, she had accompanied John Bolton, who was then the national security adviser, on a trip to London. The staffer, whom GQ is not identifying out of concerns for her privacy, did not respond to requests for comment. According to the government source, she was in her hotel room when she suddenly felt a tingling in the side of her head that was facing the window. The intense pressure in her head was accompanied by a tinning in her ears. When she left the room, the symptoms stopped. She reported the incident to the Secret Service because it was uncannily similar to the symptoms described by American diplomats who had served in Cuba and China.
At the time that was the only reported instance of anyone “getting hit” inside the United States, but the incident near the Ellipse adds to the possibility that Russian spies are doing this here as well as abroad.
This report from NBC is four months old but gives a pretty good overview of the story. Notice the hint at the end of this story about the CIA using cell phone data to track Russians with expertise in this type of weapon. They apparently found those experts were often in the cities when these attacks occurred. Haven’t heard any more about that lead since.https://www.youtube.com/embed/7AohfhX6uE4?feature=oembed Share Tweet
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Over the last five years, in the U.S. and across the West, free expression in cyberspace has come under unprecedented assault.
Uniformity of thought (groupthink) is already prevalent in every other corporate-controlled U.S. medium — print, radio, television.
The siege of U.S. cyberspace began in earnest in late 2016 with the defeat of Hillary Clinton at the hands of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election — perhaps the greatest electoral upset in American history. Every mainstream media outlet got it dead wrong. On election day, the “paper of record” New York Times gave Clinton an 85% edge. The Washington Post ran a headline that said “a comprehensive average of election forecasts points to a decisive Clinton victory.” The Huffington Post estimated a 98% chance of a Clinton win.
Trump, it turns out, won, handing the corporate press a stunning defeat in the information war.
Immediately in the aftermath of the election, Clinton and Co. rolled out the “fake news” narrative. At a Dec 9, 2016 ceremony for departing Sen. Harry Reid, Clinton set the wheels in motion for an unprecedented crackdown on cyber-speech:
It’s now clear that so-called ‘fake news’ can have real world consequences…Lives are at risk. Lives of ordinary people just trying to go about their days, to do their jobs, contribute to their communities… It’s imperative that leaders from the private sector and the public sector step up to protect our democracy and innocent lives.
The unspoken intent was clear: to give rhetorical cover to the state to reckon with the digital infosphere outside its control that had cost the DNC the election. Soon after Clinton’s Dec. 2016 declaration of war against “fake news,” the corporate press, in tandem with Silicon Valley, rolled out the censorship agenda:
If the fact-checking organizations identify a story as fake, it will get flagged as disputed and there will be a link to the corresponding article explaining why. Stories that have been disputed may also appear lower in News Feed.
A censorship bonanza ensued. Countless “fringe” media figures outside the good graces of the ruling class — on the grassroots left and right — have been purged from the web in the intervening five years.
Ultimately, the Mueller Report failed to identify any evidence at all for the “Russia-gate” conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was somehow a Kremlin agent on the Russian payroll.
The false narrative lives on, though. This incisive two-minute compilation of corporate media talking points on the “Russia-gate” conspiracy theory illustrates the lockstep rhetoric of the corporate press to push the narrative
What are the consequences of media power concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, and where do things go from here?
* * *
If all of this fearmongering sounds oddly familiar and totalitarian, that’s because the Communist Party of China (CCP) has been a pioneer in the conquest of cyberspace for decades — under the guise of combatting “misinformation” harmful to national security:
From the CCP’s perspective, “Western anti-China forces” are “actively trying to infiltrate China’s ideological sphere,” threatening China with the spearhead of Westernizing, splitting, and Color Revolutions, for which the blame is often placed upon the influence of the Internet and social media.
Chinese state censorship — along with the other tools of social control it deploys on its own population — is the model that Western governments hope to emulate:
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau met with criticism for the second time in as many days Friday, after telling a Toronto fundraising crowd that he admired China’s ‘basic dictatorship.’
The Chinese government operates what has been called the “Great Firewall” — restricting access to information deemed unacceptable by nameless state censorship agents and sending it down the Memory Hole.
The CCP exercises pernicious, ruthless dominance in its own cyberspace behind the Great Firewall. No bit of subversive minutia is too small to ban; it successfully scrubbed images of Winne the Pooh into oblivion after internet activists likened the character to CCP boss Xi Jinping in 2017.
* * *
We Western heirs to the Renaissance and Enlightenment cannot allow the internet to become the plaything of the state in the mold of the Great Firewall, for information to be censored on a whim and distorted and rebranded.
If a population in a free society grows distrustful of its government, as has occurred in the U.S., the onus should be on the state to rebuild trust — not on the population to be herded into Orwellian goodthink via censorship.
Instead of demonizing a large (and growing) portion of the citizenry that no longer has faith in the government to serve its needs, the entity that needs fixing in this scenario is the government, not the people. Free speech is that corrective mechanism.
* * *
The Jan. 6, 2021 “insurrection” in D.C. — which was largely organized on the web via hard-to-track apps like Telegram — gave further ammunition to the corporate state to justify repression of dissident voices:
In the days following the insurrection, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other major platforms have imposed stricter measures and deployed new rationales for taking action. Besides suspending or permanently banning President Trump, they’ve also removed content undermining the integrity of the election results.
Corporate-state censorship is increasingly justified on the grounds of amorphous concepts with no legal definition like “dangerous speech” or “hate speech.” Without strict legal limits on what can be considered “dangerous” or “hateful,” this 21st-century digital book-burning is left to the whims of nameless; faceless bureaucrats; or, even worse, to tech giants’ computer algorithms.
Freedom of expression is the birthright of the Western citizen — the bounty of hundreds of years of struggle against authoritarian, censorious states.
The torch of Enlightenment liberty is all but extinguished in the United States in 2021, except in the dark corners of the web. We must relight it.
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Last night, Joe Biden lied about a range of issues. NRO identifies three of Biden’s deceptions.
Phillip Klein exposes Biden’s falsehood regarding health care. Biden claimed that giving Medicare the power to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs will “strengthen the Affordable Care Act – expand Medicare coverage and benefits – without costing taxpayers one additional penny.”
Nonsense. Klein points out that the Congressional Budget Office has twice concluded that “providing broad negotiating authority by itself would likely have a negligible effect on federal spending.” (Emphasis added) Yet, Biden claimed that the supposed savings would be enough to pay for an Obamacare expansion that would cost $200 billion, according to the White House “fact sheet” released earlier in the day. [NOTE: Klein supplemented his comments in this post.]
David Harsanyi debunks Biden on guns. Biden tried to persuade his audience that gun violence has exploded due to the expiration of the ban on “assault weapons” in the early 2000s.
In fact, says Harsanyi, “the rate of gun homicide continued falling for more than a decade after the ban ended, even though gun ownership exploded.” Indeed, “from 2006, overall homicides fell ten out of 14 years” and “twenty-one years after a gun violence peaked in 1993, and a decade after the assault-weapon ban ended, homicides by firearms hit a historic low.”
Kevin Williamson attacks Biden’s “you didn’t build that” riff — his assertion that “Wall Street didn’t build this country, the middle class built this country, and unions built the middle class.” Arguably, this rhetorical flourish is too metaphorical to be a lie.
However, it’s considerably less than honest. “Wall Street” certainly played a part in building this country, just as “the middle class” and union workers did. As Williamson says:
If you think investment didn’t build this country — and in many cases, literally build it — then you are very possibly a doddering old goofus who was never very bright to begin with.
Or a past-his-sell-by-date demagogue, recycling the BS of the first-rate demagogue you once worked for.
Williamson also rightly credits Wall Street’s role in building and sustaining the middle class. He writes:
Given how much of the middle class’s wealth takes the form of equity in real estate — along with stocks held in retirement accounts — how central the financial-services industry has been in making that happen, and how few private-sector workers belong to a union, I think Wall Street has a better claim to having built the middle class than [unions] do.
Biden is an inveterateliar. When it comes to this attribute, old age isn’t slowing him down.
Like those looters in Portland, Seattle, and other U.S. cities, progressives in Washington think the property of others is theirs for the taking. They control a majority in both house of Congress and the presidency, so they believe they have the right to take whatever they wish. They have plans to eliminate the Trump tax cuts and raise personal tax rates by 25%, capital gains taxes by 60%, and corporate taxes by 33%.
The American economy is restoring itself at this moment. If Biden left it alone, the economy would be booming by the end of the year, and Biden would have something to take credit for. Instead, he is going to kill it — and the media will find a way to grant him credit for that.
Biden is intent on raising taxes for political, not for economic reasons. His advisers must know that higher taxes, especially on corporations, will lower growth and jobs, but growth and jobs, which would most benefit hourly workers, are not what they care about.
The creation of good jobs is just the opposite of what Biden wants. His administration is intent on expanding government power, something that requires ever greater dependency on government assistance. The Biden worldview sees federal, and global, government controlling every aspect of life, with autocrats like himself permanently in charge. Trump’s idea of a thriving free market with well paid workers living in freedom has no place in Biden’s agenda.
To bring about dependence, Biden proposes free college, free child care, free elder care, expanded Medicare, extended unemployment benefits, periodic stimulus checks, infrastructure handouts, and a host of other “benefits.” That’s one side of dependency — government stepping in to take the place of the family, the employer, and private charities. The other side is an attack on the free market.
Biden’s tax proposals will reduce the size of the free market over what it would otherwise have been. If a corporation is paying 28%, or 35% as some propose, instead of 21%, that’s less private revenue for capital spending, research, wages, and shareholder return (which itself is recycled back into further corporate investment and economic growth).
As Lenin put it, “the way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” Biden promises both, and make no mistake: Biden is closer to Lenin than to our Founding Fathers and to the entire history of America. It is, in fact, the Founding Fathers, our Constitution, and our liberty that progressives see as the problem. And taxes are not just their way of “paying for” new programs, which they will not pay for, in any case; taxes play a central role in transforming the nation from economic liberty to socialism and serfdom.
We may not yet be living in a communist state, but under Biden’s plan we are closer to communism than to our Founders’ idea of America. Communism promises a classless society, but it results in greater inequality along with brutal dictatorship. The way to achieve this dictatorship in America is to drive the ideal of self-responsibility and ownership from the minds of the people. What takes the place of the free market is redistribution, which is nothing more than theft.
Many Americans already believe that there is nothing wrong with stealing from their fellow citizens, with 56% favoring a wealth tax on the very rich (though not on themselves or anyone close to themselves). They have been told, again and again, that the “wealth gap” is wrong and that the only way to address it is to redistribute wealth until greater equality exists. Once this idea has been accepted, theft is no longer viewed as immoral. It becomes almost a civic duty, as it was under Bolshevism, Nazism, Maoism, and every other communist system.
In reality, all will feel the effect of Biden’s proposed taxes. Consumers are already seeing inflation as businesses raise prices in anticipation of higher taxes and regulatory costs. Tax increases are always passed on to those whom they are supposed to help. Ordinary working Americans will feel the weight of inflation, not the millionaires and billionaires. Increases in the cost of paper products announced this month won’t significantly affect those earning a half million per year, but they will seriously harm those living on $20,000.
Unfortunately, for centuries now, progressives have been attempting, with some success, to undermine the free market. Communism teaches that private property is the product of the owner’s exploitation of the labor of others. Thus, all private property is immoral, and it must be replaced with state control. Today’s progressives may not admit it, but this is the foundation of their thinking as well. For Biden, increased taxation is not just some kind of necessary evil — it is a celebrated means of destroying the America that they hate.
At the heart of the debate over taxation is the conflict between two different conceptions of ownership. The traditional teaching is that ownership is a sacred right, not to be violated except in times of real emergency, and that it is the basis for a stable and equitable society. By contrast, progressives believe that wealth is the product of exploitation, and so redistributing wealth is justified, even virtuous.
Ownership is a fundamental instinct — so much so that its importance is sometimes taken for granted. Progressives have managed to remove from public discourse just how crucial the sense of ownership is, and they have done so in part by insisting that discussion of ownership suggests immoral greed and is therefore unseemly. Google “wealth is good,” and the results will mostly focus on “wealth inequality,” which is a very different thing. The West Coast algorithms reflect progressive thinking, not reality.
It is in our nature to seek wealth and tangible assets, and to pass them on. This is not just a characteristic of a supposedly greedy bourgeoisie — it is a universal human trait that is the basis of the human instinct to engage in production and trade. And it is production and trade, and the risk-taking that goes with them, that are the fundamental basis of human well-being. And it is production and trade that Biden’s taxes will suppress.
A true ownership society must erect permanent and unassailable barriers to government theft via taxation. It must celebrate the labor that underlies wealth creation, and it must reward risk-taking and innovation. It must reflect faith in the virtue of the free market.
Most important, government must not steal from its citizens. A stable society depends on the existence of the rule of law, itself the reflection of universal aspects of human nature. And among the important of these aspects is the instinct for ownership and the aversion to theft that goes with it.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
“What’s going on here? A Washington power grab,” Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) declared in the official GOP response to Joe Biden’s speech to the joint session of Congress. Biden promised to bring America together, Scott argued, but has instead pursued “agendas that tear us apart.” And nowhere is that more true of Biden and Democrats, Scott declared, than on the issue of race.
Yes, it’s true that racism exists in America, Scott tells viewers, because he’s experienced it himself. Very recently, as he points out, and from the same political side that wants to make everything about race. You cannot end division with more division, and the past is not the present or the future unless we let it be:
I have experienced the pain of discrimination. I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason. To be followed around a store while I’m shopping. I remember, every morning, at the kitchen table, my grandfather would have the newspaper in his hands. Later, I realized he had never learned to read it. He just wanted to set the right example.
“I’ve also experienced a different kind of intolerance. I get called “Uncle Tom” and the N-word — by ‘progressives’! By liberals! Just last week, a national newspaper suggested my family’s poverty was actually privilege because a relative owned land generations before my time. …
When America comes together, we’ve made tremendous progress. But powerful forces want to pull us apart. A hundred years ago, kids in classrooms were taught the color of their skin was their most important characteristic — and if they looked a certain way, they were inferior. Today, kids again are being taught that the color of their skin defines them — and if they look a certain way, they’re an oppressor.
From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress. By doubling down on the divisions we’ve worked so hard to heal. You know this stuff is wrong. Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.
Perhaps racism is America’s original sin, Scott allows, but that isn’t our destiny:
Our best future won’t come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams. It will come from you — the American people. Black, Hispanic, white and Asian. Republican and Democrat. Brave police officers and Black neighborhoods. We are not adversaries. We are family! We are all in this together.
And we get to live in the greatest country on Earth. The country where my grandfather, in his 94 years, saw his family go from cotton to Congress in one lifetime. So I am more than hopeful — I am confident — that our finest hour is yet to come. Original sin is never the end of the story. Not in our souls, and not for our nation. The real story is always redemption.
It’s a powerful speech, much more personal and value-driven than normal State of the Union responses. (Again, technically this wasn’t technically a SOTU, but the trappings were identical.) Scott turned out to be a wise choice for a fraught moment, with Scott uniquely positioned to deliver on this argument for unity rather than policies and attitudes of segregation. While racism still exists in the hearts of some Americans, government can’t reach to that level — and the attempts to do so only make the situation worse by cementing the idea that race is destiny. Government’s role in this debate is to ensure equal protection under, and equal application of, the law. Scott’s speech reminds us of that reality, and the corrosive direction we have taken over the last few years in creating this idea that color is destiny and that redemption is impossible. The alternative is a dead end, as we have seen over the past year.
It’s worth noting too that Scott departed from the usual formula of SOTU responses. Normally, the response speech attacks the policies of the administration and lays out the opposition’s agenda for the next year as an alternative, usually tied to the next election. Scott touches on this, but mainly in contrasting Biden’s proposals to the previous administration, and even then only briefly. Only on infrastructure did Scott get specific at all on current Republican proposals and Democrats’ refusal to engage them, offering a memorable line: “They won’t even build bridges… to build bridges!”
Scott’s purpose and focus was clear. He wants an end to fracturing on racial, ethnic, and ideological lines. It’s a powerful argument — if people bother to truly listen.
Joe Biden’s speech to a joint session of Congress last night was Twilight Zone material. The White House has posted the text here.
As always, Biden himself looked like an escapee from Madam Tussauds, but he appeared to have had a touch-up for his appearance last night. Through the proliferation of falsehoods, the clichés, the incredibly tired language, the theme was too much is not enough and Biden’s head emerged as its expressive form. Even with the best efforts of cosmetic surgeons, no one would mistake Biden for anyone but a superannuated politico who has stayed too long at the fair.
The setting was bizarre even by Twilight Zone standards. House seats were mostly vacant. Mask theater was the order of the day. Who among those in attendance is at risk of contracting Covid?
Despite the manifest fear of the virus communicated by the scene, Biden rattled on about his great vaccination success. As usual, he did so without any mention of the man who made it possible, thus giving us yet another opportunity to meditate on the smallness of the man and his minions. It would be to his benefit to fake a kind word about the contribution of his predecessor, but it is not in their playbook. That much I can tell you.
The speech should have worked its greatest effect on those who know nothing of LBJ and the Great Society, the Carter administration, and of American history generally. Other sorry historical episodes came to mind as Biden unveiled his big plans of free stuff for everyone, “good jobs” that are net detriments to productive economic activity, and the assessment attributed to the intelligence community: “[We] won’t ignore what our own intelligence agencies have determined – the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today is from white supremacist terrorism.”
Can we get a new set of intelligence agencies?
On the too much is not enough front, Biden also decried “systemic racism in our criminal justice system.” This combines generalized defamation with a global falsehood. Racial disparities in offending rates must be ignored and cannot be mentioned.
According to Biden, Vice President Harris is undertaking to resolve the “root problems of migration.” This was the euphemistic nod to the crisis at the border. It harks back to the liberal devotion to resolving the “root causes” of crime.
Biden expressed his “absolute confidence she will get the job done.” If you are prone to ask yourself why this woman is laughing, this must be one of the reasons.
Biden’s speech afforded Senator Tim Scott the opportunity to deliver the Republican rebuttal. Newsweek has posted the text here. He drew on his personal story to deny that America is a racist country and deliver a few more home truths.
Quotable quote (Tim Scott): “I’ve also experienced a different kind of intolerance. I get called Uncle Tom and the n-word by progressives by liberals. Just last week, a national newspaper [the Washington Post] suggested my family’s poverty was actually privilege. Because a relative owned land, generations before my time. Believe me, I know first-hand, our healing is not finished.”
MN Prager Discussion Group 
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